Geotour timeline

The Geotour platform now incorporates an Interactive 3D Map, a digital tool designed for the exploration of Crete’s geography. This component utilizes CesiumJS technology to render a three-dimensional model of the island, representing its topography and features. The 3D map allows users to navigate a virtual representation of Crete, offering perspectives on its terrain, including mountains, gorges, and coastlines. Users can manipulate the viewpoint by zooming, tilting, and rotating the camera to examine locations from various angles. The standalone version of the app can be found in https://tour.geotour.gr/3dmap Functional Overview and Benefits The Interactive 3D Map serves several key functions…
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Combining the population of the villages and abandoned villages, as well as an estimation of how important older sites were, Geotour presents an interactive map of Crete with these numbers as spikes. The map is not complete and as more villages, abandoned villages, and sites are added to the site, the map will be more complete. Important note: the villages and their population are still updated, so not all the villages of Crete are in the map and of course not all the years of the existing villages are updated yet. Also, the major cities of Crete (Heraklion, Chania, Rethymno,…
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A custom AI-powered agent has been developed to enhance user experience on the geotour.gr website. It provides an interactive and informative way to explore Crete’s attractions by utilizing the pydantic-ai library to interact with the Gemini language model. The agent retrieves data from a custom WordPress API endpoint, asks for a keyword from the user, and then asks them for questions. From these, it constructs prompts for Gemini and generates human-readable answers by combining Gemini’s responses with relevant information from the retrieved data.

Cretan Villages Integrated: Geotour has expanded its scope to include villages throughout Crete. This started with villages that host festivals and events that celebrate culture, local products, sustainability, and the preservation of historical memory but it soon expanded to include more and more. This also led to the hunting for information on the Cultural Associations of these villages which is used to make a catalog of contact details of these groups. This catalog can be seen here https://www.geotour.gr/cultural-associations-contacts/.

Informative Enhancements Integrated: Alongside the ongoing development of listings and virtual tours, Geotour has implemented several informative enhancements to further benefit users. To aid in trip planning, a weather forecast feature powered by the OpenMeteo API has been integrated into most listings, providing 3-day forecasts. Moreover, to enrich the cultural and historical context of many listings, information from the SearchCulture repository has been seamlessly incorporated into the platform. Additionally, Google Maps reviews are now integrated into relevant listings, providing valuable insights from other travelers. To assist users in planning their itineraries, listings related to events or festivals display relevant dates on a calendar, highlighting temporal connections between different listings.

Virtual Navigation Implemented: With the continuous expansion of listings, Geotour has introduced a new feature to enhance user engagement. Many listings now feature interactive spherical panorama photos, enabling immersive virtual tour. Beyond enriching the visual experience, this functionality offers an alternative navigation method, allowing users to explore locations virtually and seamlessly discover related content within the platform.